This is going to ramble a bit. I ended up going a completely different direction from what I had in mind when I started. If you give a man a fishyou feed him for a day, the old saw goes. And if you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. As […]

I’ve been having a discussion with a friend, and he brought up the “how hard people have it” argument. One thing that occurred to me is that economic and technological progress didn’t occur in areas where people had it easy.

Polynesia didn’t develop engineering, but Scotland did. The expert sailors of the Mediterranean became experts because they had to leave their rocky islands in order to find food.

And then there’s the socialist dream: give everyone an income and provide for all their needs and they’ll have time to create artistic masterpieces and invent technological marvels. How’s that working out?

It’s said, if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. Maybe, if you want a culture to reach the heights, it needs to start in the bottom of a well. By the time it reaches ground level, it’s built up momentum that makes it impossible to catch.